The traditional 7200 RPM hard drive has taken a backseat role since the introduction of "green" hard drives with enormous capacities, high energy efficiency, low acoustic noise and somewhat subpar speed. The appetite for byte storage has grown exponentially, with consumers feasting on these uber-cheap drives, performance be damned. 7200 RPM drives are now gourmet cuisine, premium models commanding much higher prices than the 5400~5900 RPM slop gorged on by the masses.

Recently Seagate pulled up the brakes on their 5900 RPM Barracuda Green series, announcing they would consolidate their desktop drives into a single 7200 RPM family simply named Barracuda. The move helps consolidate their manufacturing process, potentially paving a shorter road to recovery from the floods in Thailand that have ravaged the supply of hard drives and hard drive components. The loss of the Green line may result in loss market share to competitors like WD's Caviar Green, but with the current price volatility it will be sometime before the full ramifications will be known.

The Seagate Barracuda 3TB.

The underside.

There is nothing too exciting on paper about the new Barracuda line, save for the move to 1TB platters for the larger models of the family. The 1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB, and 3TB variants sport the massive new disks, along with 64MB of cache. The increase in areal density means our 3TB sample (model number ST3000DM001) weighs just 630 gram, on par with most 3-platter models from days gone by. The casing isn't anything special, looking identical to the one utilized in the now extinct 3-platter Barracuda Green 2TB.